As Mark is letting himself in the front door, he calls out his aunt’s name. He does this so that she won’t get a fright when he suddenly appears in the kitchen or the living room. She isn’t used to being alone yet and the least thing seems to spook her. Of course, it’s been only six months since Uncle Des died, which is nothing, Mark supposes – especially if you’ve been married to someone for more than forty years.
He takes a few steps along the hallway and calls her name out again. ‘Aunt Lilly?’
From behind the kitchen door, he hears a sharp, panicky intake of breath.
Shit.
‘It’s only me, Aunt Lilly. It’s Mark.’
‘Oh. Oh.’ Then, ‘I’m in here.’
Mark opens the door and walks into the kitchen. His aunt is sitting at the table. There are piles of documents spread out in front of her. Through a door on the left he can see into the living room. The TV is on, but the sound is down.
His aunt looks up at him and smiles nervously.
‘Thanks for coming, Mark. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘Oh, you’d be fine, Aunt Lilly, believe me.’
He goes over and kisses her on the forehead. He then pulls out a chair next to hers. He sits on the edge of the chair and leans forward, hands together, like a doctor about to begin a consultation. He even says, ‘Now, what seems to be the problem?’
Aunt Lilly is in her late sixties but looks older. Her hair is grey and she is small and bony. Mark can see that the last few months have taken a lot out of her.
‘It’s these Eircom bills,’ she says, pointing to the pile directly in front of her. ‘I don’t understand them, and they seem so high.’
‘I barely understand mine, Aunt Lilly. I think you’d need a degree in accountancy to understand the average Eircom bill.’
He takes a page from the top of the pile and examines it. After his uncle Des died, it quickly became apparent that Aunt Lilly had no idea about money or bills – ‘that was always his department,’ she said – so Mark ended up dealing with the solicitors and processing all of the necessary paperwork. He’s been helping her out ever since, with little things: setting up standing orders at the bank, cancelling subscriptions to magazines and, not least, interpreting the runic complexities of her utility bills.
‘That’s a lovely suit,’ Aunt Lilly says, reaching over and stroking the sleeve of his jacket.
‘Yeah, it’s Italian,’ he says, not looking up from the Eircom bill. ‘Surprise, surprise.’
‘And the shoes?’
‘Yeah. You have to make an impression. That’s what it’s all about these days.’
‘La bella figura.’
‘Well, they invented it.’
Mark half suspects that these emergency calls of his aunt’s are as much about the company as anything else – which is fine. It’s a bit like having the TV on, unwatched, in another room. He does see her regularly, at least once a week, but if she needs an extra visit now and again, he’s more than willing to oblige. She’s certainly done enough for him.
‘Erm, did Uncle Des have broadband?’
Aunt Lilly looks slightly pained, as though he’s just asked her to explain the general theory of relativity. ‘Broad -?’
‘Broadband. On his computer. There’s a monthly charge here for it.’
‘He did use the computer quite a bit.’
‘Well, I’m sure that’s it then. I’ll get them to cancel it. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of everything.’
He replaces the Eircom bill.
From where he’s sitting Mark can see the TV flickering in the next room. He shifts his chair slightly so that the TV is no longer in his direct line of vision.
‘You’re very good,’ Aunt Lilly says. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
Mark looks at his watch. It’s just after nine. He’s meeting that builder again in town, but not until eleven.
‘Yeah, why not? Thanks.’
It was a more convoluted process than he’d imagined, but he’s pretty confident now about securing the contract.
Aunt Lilly gets up and busies herself with the kettle.
Mark flicks a tiny piece of lint from his trouser leg.
Then he turns his attention to the documents spread out on the table. Besides the pile of Eircom bills, there are ESB bills, NTL bills, bank statements, share certificates, tax-relief certificates, P60 forms. They go back over what must be years, and in some cases possibly even decades.
He feels a sudden ripple of anxiety.
‘Aunt Lilly?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why do you keep all of this stuff?’
She’s standing at the counter, and turns around. He sees that she’s slicing what looks like a Madeira cake.
‘I… don’t know. Des was very conscientious about paperwork and things like that. Why?’
‘It isn’t necessary, that’s all. Going back a few years maybe, but this seems a bit extreme. I mean, these days, with identity theft and all, you can’t be too careful.’
The second he says that he wishes he’d kept his mouth shut.
‘Identity what?’
He explains briefly, doing his best to make it sound as innocuous as possible. She is, nevertheless, appalled.
He knows that his aunt is trying to keep herself busy here, organising all of this paperwork, but he resolves to bring a small office shredder with him the next time he comes, and with her permission he’ll destroy most of it.
She arrives carrying a tray. Mark makes some space on the table by picking up a thick wad of old bank statements, and as Aunt Lilly settles the tray and starts fussing with the tea things, he idly flicks through them.
Some of these statements are more than twenty years old.
Uncle Des…
Mark gives a little shake of his head.
The man was so fastidious, so hardworking, so morally upstanding. OK, he was also introspective and moody, and seemed, on a permanent basis, to be angry about something – but he managed to keep that to himself. He never took it out on anyone. He never lost his temper.
He was a good man, a good father, and Mark misses him.
He rests the wad of bank statements in his lap.
This isn’t easy. Mark has only the vaguest memories of his natural father – his parents died when he was five – but whenever he does think of him, of Tony, he gets this weird feeling in his head, or maybe it’s in his heart… a plunging, plummeting rush of confusion, of longing, and of course – Jesus – of guilt. It’s intangible and unquantifiable, but the feeling is as real to him as a migraine headache, or a malignant tumour.
With his uncle, on the other hand, things were always a good deal simpler. Despite the moodiness, Des was a father figure who didn’t come with any real baggage.
Looking around the room now, at all the documents on the table, up at Aunt Lilly, Mark wonders – and quite possibly for the first time – what it was that his uncle ever had to be so angry about. He also wonders – and most definitely for the first time – if any of it had to do with him, if any of it might somehow have been his fault…
When she gets up, Gina has a splitting headache. She did have a few glasses of wine last night, finally – but this isn’t a hangover. She hopes that taking a shower will ease the pounding in her head. When it doesn’t, she takes two Panadol. She puts on coffee and goes to the bedroom to get dressed.
She’s glad the weekend is over. As it was happening, it felt endless, and desolate, and empty. Now that it’s Monday morning, though, she’s not sure how much any of that is going to change.
After the funeral on Friday, there was a big catered thing back at the house on Clyde Road. With her three sisters there, and various relatives, and old friends from Dolanstown – all of them clearly uncomfortable – Gina came to appreciate for the first time the divide that existed in Noel’s life between where he came from and where he ended up. Later on, out in Yvonne’s house, there was a lot of reminiscing, vodka-fuelled for the most part, and sitting there listening to it Gina also came to realise that there was a good twenty years of Noel’s life – the first twenty – that she had no knowledge or memory of at all.
Saturday was spent mainly at Catherine’s. Various people stopped by, but there was no real structure to it anymore. The formal side of things was over, and as the day progressed there was an awful sense of not wanting to let go – coupled with a growing realisation that everyone else, the rest of the world, already had. On Sunday morning, lying in bed, Gina thought obsessively about the previous weekend. She was tormented by its innocence and abandon, by its blind ignorance of what lay ahead. She spent most of the day alone, curled up on the sofa, unable to face any of the usual Sunday stuff – the papers, the eggs, the laundry.
She managed to rouse herself from this torpor towards evening time. Then at around seven, P.J. phoned, and she agreed to meet him for a drink. They met in Kehoe’s and had a fairly depressing conversation about the future of Lucius Software. They skirted around it but eventually had to admit that with no production date in sight, and the economy heading into recession, the chances of a second round of VC funding were looking increasingly slim.
Sitting at her kitchen table now, Gina sips coffee, unconcerned about the location of keys, mobile phone, earrings, her Monday morning drained of its urgency.
She’ll go into the office all right – there’s plenty to do – but not until later. In the meantime, she has that appointment in Baggot Street at ten o’clock.
As Gina leaves her building, walks along the quays and makes her way over to Pearse Street, she thinks about Paddy Norton and what she’s going to say to him. She also thinks about her sisters, none of whom seems to share her concerns about the way their brother died. When she brought it up on Saturday, for the second or third time, Michelle even snapped at her and told her to stop it.
Which, in fairness, she did.
Gina’s concerns are real, but she also knows that people grieve in different ways, and that maybe this is just her way. If so, she doesn’t want to impose that on anyone else – at least not for the moment.
Halfway along Baggot Street, Gina takes Norton’s business card out of her bag and looks at it.
After another few minutes, she finds the address.
It’s a modern office building, an International Style glass box, but at only six storeys a little odd-looking – like a skyscraper in miniature, something squeezed down in scale to fit into its more elegant, Georgian surroundings. Put up sometime in the late seventies, she guesses, or early eighties, the building is quite ugly, and already appears dilapidated, streaked on the outside, as if it’s been dipped in some sort of corrosive chemical.
Gina goes into the lobby and glances around. Straight ahead, there is an unoccupied marble reception desk. Hanging above it there is a huge frameless painting – thick yellow stripes against a grainy bluish background. Next to this there is a directory, which Gina consults. She sees that Winterland Properties is on the third floor.
She takes the elevator up, and Norton’s secretary shows her into his office. Gina is surprised by the decor. Like the fittings and corporate artwork in the lobby, it has quite a dated feel to it. Norton’s desk is a huge mahogany affair, and in front of it there are two red leather sofas with a glass coffee table between them. The table is scattered with magazines. On the wall facing the desk, there is a mahogany cabinet with a large TV set in the middle of it.
‘Gina… Gina.’
Norton comes out from behind his desk and extends his hand. He’s wearing a grey suit with a powder-blue shirt and a slightly darker blue tie. Gina steps forward.
‘Hi, Mr Norton.’
‘Paddy. Jesus. Call me Paddy.’
They shake hands.
‘OK… Paddy, thanks.’
‘How are you?’
‘I’m all right. You know.’ The face Gina makes here – half pained, half resigned – is meant to express a keen desire to move on. But before she can say anything more, Norton claps his hands together.
‘Gina,’ he says, ‘I was going to propose something to you this morning. I was going to ask if you’d like to come and have a look at Richmond Plaza, let me give you a tour, show you the view from the top.’
Gina stares at him for a moment in surprise, as though he has just spoken to her in Chinese.
‘In Noel’s honour sort of thing.’ He pauses. ‘I mean, we both know how dedicated he was to the project, right?’
Gina certainly wasn’t expecting this, but after a pause she nods her head and says, ‘Yes, yes, I’d really like that.’
‘Good,’ Norton says, ‘good.’
There is a coat draped on one of the leather sofas. He reaches over and picks it up. He puts it on and holds a hand out, indicating the door. ‘OK then,’ he says, ‘let’s go.’
In the mid-morning traffic, it takes them about twenty minutes to get to Richmond Dock. Norton’s car is spacious and very comfortable, but with its sickly beige leather upholstery and pine air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror, Gina ends up feeling a little queasy and doesn’t say much. Norton, in any case, talks non-stop and goes into a level of technical detail about the project that she quickly finds incomprehensible.
At the site, Norton parks on the street, and they get out of the car. There is a wide paved concourse in front of Richmond Plaza, and as they walk across it, Gina leans backwards and looks up. Most of the building has external cladding in place and looks finished. The very top levels, though, seem more exposed, and dissolve into a blur. At the base of the building there is an arched glass entranceway, with space on either side for what will probably be large retail units.
Leading the way, Norton goes left across the concourse towards a sectioned-off area. Here, behind the wooden hoarding, it looks like a proper building site, with mud and cables and diggers and Portakabin huts. There is a gigantic tower crane on its concrete base. There are construction workers everywhere. Norton and Gina make their way to a row of prefab structures, one of which is an office. Norton signs in and introduces Gina to the project manager, a thin, earnest man in his late forties. They don hard hats and safety jackets, and the project manager then takes up where Norton left off – rolling out specs and statistics.
They go back across the concourse and enter the building proper. It takes Gina a moment to realise, as she looks up and around her, that what they are standing in here is a colossal atrium. It must extend to at least ten levels above them. Through the scaffolding and hanging power cables she can see that it’s going to have galleried floors on three sides, with Plexiglas elevators, probably, on the fourth. On one of the sides, reaching up diagonally to the next level, there is an escalator frame, not quite locked into place, that looks like a huge dinosaur skeleton in a natural-history museum.
They cross the atrium, passing a bank of six more elevators over to the right, and walk along a dimly lit corridor, eventually coming out at a large service elevator next to a loading dock. When they get into the elevator car, the project manager hits an unmarked switch. The car lurches slightly, starts moving and then picks up speed.
A few moments later, the door opens and they step out. ‘Level 48’ is painted on a partition directly in front of them. To the left there are five or six construction workers standing around and next to them on the floor are some loose sections of what look like air-conditioning ducts.
The project manager leads the way, taking Gina and Norton around the partition. Except for the core section and a grid of supporting steel columns, Level 48 is an open space. Its left and right sides have wall units and glazing frames already fitted, but the far end, with only a few interlocking steel girders and protective barriers, looks very exposed.
‘It’s not safe to go up on the roof,’ Norton says, ‘but I think you’ll get the picture from here.’
The project manager is about to say something when his mobile goes off. He answers it, listens, nods. After a moment, he gestures at Norton, pointing downwards. He turns to Gina, shakes his head apologetically and then scuttles back towards the elevator, the phone still at his ear.
‘Impressed?’ Norton says.
‘Yes. Yes. It’s… amazing.’
‘Of course, a project of this sort is all about teamwork and collaboration, that goes without saying – but don’t be in any doubt, Gina, your brother made his contribution here, and you should be proud of him.’
As Gina turns to look at Norton, her eyes well up. ‘I am,’ she says in a whisper.
Norton puts a hand out to her, but Gina moves away. She quickly regains her composure, takes a paper tissue from her pocket and blows her nose. ‘Sorry.’
‘Jesus,’ Norton says. ‘For what?’
‘Oh, you know. I suppose. I don’t know. Look, er…’ She hesitates, dabbing her nose with the tissue.
‘Yes?’
‘We were… talking on Thursday evening -’
‘Yes.’ Norton straightens up. ‘Yes indeed we were.’
‘So I just wanted to ask you -’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, the thing is, you see, I’m finding it hard to accept that the two deaths… well, that they were entirely unconnected.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. I mean, you know what kind of activity my nephew was involved in, right?’
Norton nods.
‘Well, I can’t help feeling that his killing may in some way have led to, or caused, my brother’s death.’
‘Oh. Oh. I see.’ Norton appears to relax a bit. ‘But what are you basing this on? I mean, Noel’s death was an accident, surely?’
‘Yes, but… I don’t know. What I wanted to ask you was – and maybe this is totally out of order, please tell me if it is – but… could there be any links between the building trade and gangland crime… I don’t know, with unions, or suppliers, or…’
She feels totally out on a limb with this, even more so than when she put the same question to Terry Stack.
‘Gina,’ Norton then says, indulgently, not quite smiling, ‘maybe that’s the image you have of the building trade from TV and movies, but let me tell you, the reality is quite different. These days it’s a very regulated industry. The contractors I use are crucified with regulations and directives and what have you.’
Gina nods along.
‘So really,’ he goes on, ‘I think what you’re suggesting is…’ He decides to leave it unsaid.
Gina continues nodding.
‘Look,’ Norton then says, ‘I know it’s hard to accept, but this was a road accident. Noel was tired, he was stressed out. You said so yourself.’ He pauses. ‘Didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Stressed out about work, you said.’
‘Yes.’
Norton stares at Gina. Is he waiting for her to expand on this? He seems to be.
‘Well,’ she says eventually, ‘there was that problem, that… situation, some engineering thing he said… he didn’t go into it, but -’
‘Yes, yes.’ Norton looks down at the floor. ‘That was sorted out. It was just a minor hitch, one of many along the way, believe me.’
‘Anyway,’ Gina goes on, ‘what’s really bugging me is this idea that he was drunk. The Noel I knew wouldn’t drive -’
Norton looks up again. ‘Listen Gina,’ he says quite firmly, ‘all I know is – and this may not be easy to accept either – all I know is… I was with him in town earlier, and he did have a couple of drinks.’
‘Yeah, but -’
‘And the police have said that he was over the limit.’
‘But -’
She stops there. What’s the point? Noel wasn’t even remotely drunk when she spoke to him outside Catherine’s house. So what does she do now? Call Norton a liar? Or a fool? Call the police fools?
After a moment, another question occurs to her. ‘When Noel left you, he went out to my sister’s house, yeah?’
Norton nods.
‘But then he went back into town. He told me he had to pick up something. Do you have any idea where he might have gone… or who he might have seen?’
Norton shakes his head. ‘No. I’m sorry. I have no idea.’
Gina’s eyes plead for more.
‘I am sorry,’ he says, ‘really. But I’m afraid something you can’t discount, Gina, is the possibility that wherever Noel did go -’
‘- that he had more to drink there?’
‘Yes,’ Norton says, and shrugs.
Stung by this, Gina doesn’t know what to say next. Her stomach is churning. Also, in her skirt and jacket she’s not exactly dressed for the occasion – it’s windy up here and very cold. Not about to give in, though, she points at the far end of Level 48 and says, ‘Can we take a closer look?’
‘Of course.’
They walk the length of this huge space in silence. As they get nearer to the south-facing end, the view rises up to meet them. They stop in front of the protective barrier, with about a yard to spare, which is plenty, because spread out below them – half framed by the crane’s tower and jib sections – is the whole of Dublin city. It is spectacular, and Gina begins to feel a little overwhelmed. Visible everywhere are landmark buildings, church spires, parks, squares, housing estates – with the river, like a deep, irregular gash, dividing it all in two.
She looks for her apartment building along the quays. She then locates where Dolanstown should be, and stares at it in amazement. Unreal, dreamlike, this is an entirely new perspective on where she grew up.
‘It’s incredible,’ she says.
‘Yes, it is. But it’s only the start, you know.’
Gina turns to look at him. ‘The start? What is?’
‘This,’ Norton says, ‘Richmond Plaza. I see it as the first in a cluster of riverfront skyscrapers.’ He raises his arm in a grand gesture to indicate the entire docklands area. ‘I see all of this being developed. I see it becoming a sort of new Hong Kong on Europe’s Atlantic rim.’
Gina nods. Her expression is neutral.
‘This downturn won’t last,’ he goes on. ‘It can’t. There’s too much left to do. And besides, development like this will stimulate a new wave of inward investment from the US. So we can do it. I mean, look at what they did in Shanghai ten years ago. It was phenomenal.’ He pauses, as something seems to occur to him. Then he says, ‘Of course, Noel was there, he saw it, back in the late nineties -’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, on trade delegations, with Larry Bolger… it was in some sort of advisory capacity, I think. Anyway, he said that across from the Bund you used to see only fields and maybe a warehouse or two. Then suddenly it was all bamboo scaffolding and green safety nets. Then before you knew it, wham, they had a skyline.’
Gina remembers these trips now, but only vaguely – because what would she have been doing at the time? Studying for her diploma? Starting her first job? Glued to a computer terminal in some windowless office? She didn’t see Noel very often back then.
‘Or look at Dubai,’ Norton is saying. ‘There’s no reason why we can’t do that in this country, if we hold our nerve, no reason at all. And Noel saw these possibilities too, you know. It’s just…’ He pauses, shaking his head in what seems to be exasperation. ‘It’s just that a grand-scale project like this requires more than vision. It requires, if you’ll excuse the expression, balls of steel -’
Gina gets the feeling he’s no longer talking about her brother.
‘- because you can’t let anything get in your way, you can’t let anyone get in your way…’
Norton is interrupted here by a sudden burst of baroque concerto music. Gina is startled and it takes her a moment to realise that it’s a mobile ringtone.
She watches as Norton pulls his phone out and checks the incoming number on the display.
‘Sorry,’ he says, holding up a finger. ‘I’ll… just a moment.’ He turns away and cuts the Vivaldi off. ‘Larry, what is it?’
Gina turns in the opposite direction. She takes a couple of steps closer to the protective barrier – which hardly comes up to her waist – and looks down. Far below she can see tiny cars streaming along the quays.
Behind her, she can hear Norton talking.
To Larry Bolger?
‘… yeah the Wilson, it’s up on Madison Avenue, in the low seventies I think…’
Gina was surprised to find out the other night that Larry Bolger and her brother knew each other so well. She is surprised to find out today that they went on trade delegations together to Shanghai.
‘… and remember he’s an old man, he’s been around a long time…’
Gina is beginning to realise just how many things there are about Noel that she doesn’t know.
‘… look, meet him tomorrow and we’ll talk afterwards, OK?’
She turns around. Norton is putting his phone away.
‘Who was that?’ she says. ‘Larry Bolger?’
Norton looks surprised. ‘Yes, it was, as a matter of fact.’
‘Oh.’
‘He’s at the airport.’
‘I see.’
‘Heading off to the States, on a junket. It’s another one of those trade delegations, actually.’
Gina nods. ‘So he and Noel knew each other pretty well?’
‘They did, yes.’
‘When I spoke to him on Thursday, he said they played poker together. Is that right?’
‘Yeah, Noel ran rings around him, I’m afraid. Took him to the cleaners. Poor Larry’s probably going to be the next taoiseach and the man is an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler. God help us all.’ He stops suddenly and stares at Gina. ‘I didn’t say that… you didn’t hear that from me.’
Gina gives her head a quick shake, as if to say, Don’t worry about it.
‘I’m sorry,’ Norton says, ‘I’m sorry. Larry’s a good friend of mine, I’ve known him for twenty-five years. It’s just that, well, impulse control wouldn’t be his strongest suit.’
Gina nods along.
‘But he’s on the straight and narrow these days. He really is. He’s doing well. He’s sober and… whatever. Why are we talking about Larry Bolger?’
Gina doesn’t know. She shakes her head.
Norton glances at his watch. ‘Listen, I’ve got a meeting with some letting agents, so…’
‘Of course,’ Gina says.
He starts to move.
But she can feel another opportunity slipping away here. If she’s going to persist in this, she needs to be more focused, more direct.
‘Er… Paddy,’ she says, ‘you worked with Noel, you knew him, or at least talked with him, right?’
Norton stops, tensing a little, and turns back. ‘Yes.’
Gina takes a deep breath. ‘Did he ever mention… our nephew?’
Norton puts on a pained expression. ‘Look, Gina -’
‘Or Terry Stack, or…’
‘No, he didn’t.’
There is a shift in his tone here.
‘Well,’ Gina says, pushing on, ‘I don’t know, can you think of a reason, any reason at all, why -’
Norton throws his eyes up. ‘Why what?’
‘- why anyone might want to kill him?’
‘Gina,’ Norton says, openly impatient now, ‘for God’s sake, no one wanted to kill your brother, and no one did kill him. It was an accident.’
Gina swallows. ‘I’m afraid I just don’t accept that.’
Norton takes a couple of steps towards her. ‘Well, you’re going to have to accept it. People die on our roads every day of the week.’
When he’s standing directly in front of her, he reaches out and takes a firm grip on her arm. He stares into her eyes. Gina isn’t comfortable with this and would like to move. But it’s awkward. She’d have to pull away and step around him.
Because she can’t very well step backwards.
He tightens his grip. ‘Do you hear me?’
Gina meets his stare.
Up close like this, there’s something a little unsettling about the way Norton looks. She’s only noticing it now. His fleshy face has a pale, almost greyish, complexion. The pupils of his eyes are like pins, and seem to be dilating. She is also surprised – despite the cold – to see a bead of sweat on his upper lip.
And she can smell him.
It’s a pungent mixture, though of what she’s not sure – cologne anyway, cigar smoke probably… and something else, mouthwash possibly, or mints.
‘Gina?’
She nods. ‘Yes, I hear you, but I don’t – I can’t – accept it.’
‘Jesus,’ Norton says, close to shouting now, ‘why does everything have to be a bloody conspiracy these days? The man was drunk, behind the wheel of his car. Isn’t that enough?’
Gina stares at him.
Enough for what?
Her arm is starting to hurt.
She can feel the barrier pressing against the back of her legs.
Another couple of seconds pass and then Norton steps away suddenly, pulling her towards him. ‘It’s dangerous there,’ he says, releasing her roughly. ‘You were too close to the barrier.’
He turns and walks off.
Gina looks over her shoulder, heart pounding, and catches a glimpse of the city below. The view is shifting, almost kaleidoscopic, and it makes her feel a little dizzy. For the first time up here she can actually imagine losing her balance.
When she looks back, Norton is already halfway to the service elevator at the other end.
She follows him.
On the way down neither of them says a word.
Gina closes her eyes.
What is it, she wonders… with Norton, with her sisters? Everyone seems to be pissed off at her. Yvonne and Michelle she can understand, in a way – they’re not ready to face this yet, and that’s fine. But Norton? What’s he afraid of? Some perceived threat to his precious business interests? The negative publicity that a possible link with a gangland killing might generate?
As the elevator comes to a halt, Gina opens her eyes.
But what if her suspicion – or theory, or whatever she wants to call it – is confirmed?
What if there is a link?
They walk in silence through the atrium and out of the building.
But then again, what if there isn’t?
They go back to the prefab office, where they hand in their hard hats and protective jackets.
Out on the street, Gina does her best to ignore the shift in mood and thanks Norton for the tour of the building.
He grunts something in reply.
When they get to his car, he asks – staring at the pavement – if he can drop her off anywhere, but she says she’s OK. She lives on the quays, up towards town, and will walk.
Norton hesitates. ‘I’m sorry about before,’ he says. ‘It’s just… this is all very upsetting.’
‘I know. I know.’
‘I just… I think the man should be allowed to rest in peace.’
‘I know.’
He then nods at her and gets into his car. Gina watches as he speeds off towards the East Link toll bridge.
She bites her lower lip.
People die on our roads every day of the week.
So is that it? Is he right after all?
Maybe.
She crosses to the other side of the street and heads up the quays. She holds her jacket closed against the wind.
But maybe – and just to see it through – she should have one more little chat with Terry Stack.
Even though the prospect doesn’t exactly appeal to her.
As she walks along, Gina glances every now and again to the left, into the dark-flowing Liffey – but this only adds to her anxiety. It’s as though the river might somehow have a surprise in store, as though it wouldn’t be at all inconceivable for the murky water itself to rise up suddenly and reach out from between the stone banks in a great whoosh to engulf her.
Soon after he gets across the East Link toll bridge, Norton pulls in at the side of the road. He puts a hand up to his chest and takes a few deep breaths.
‘Oh my God,’ he says out loud.
He fumbles in his jacket pocket for his pillbox. When he finally gets it out, he knocks back two Narolet tablets.
‘Oh my God.’
He cannot believe how close he came to pushing that girl over the barrier, to giving her a quick shove and…
He shakes his head.
He has never committed an act of violence in his life, not directly… but Jesus…
It would have been so easy.
And, of course, for a variety of reasons, insane. Because someone would have seen him doing it, one of the construction workers behind them, or one of the crane operators maybe. And in the unlikely event of no one seeing it, there’d be the sheer coincidence of another death in the same family, and the awkward questions that would raise. Not to mention the negative impact of all the publicity.
But apart from anything else, it was the feeling – for the two or three seconds he was holding her by the arm – the feeling, the urge to do it.
Like electricity in his veins.
Jesus.
Talk about fucking impulse control.
Norton’s hands are shaking.
He had no real intention of doing it, clearly, it would have been madness, it’s just that… she was being so stubborn.
He rubs his chest. He’s still breathing heavily.
Could he actually have done it?
He thinks of his daughter, Patricia, who lives in Chicago and would be the same age, more or less, as Gina. He tries to picture her standing there, in Gina’s place. He tries to drum up the appropriate level of emotion.
But it doesn’t come.
He feels flushed. He looks at himself in the rearview mirror.
He starts the car again.
By the time he’s on Strand Road, and the Narolet is kicking in, he begins to calm down, and to realise that the issue here isn’t whether or not he is capable, or was capable, of pushing Gina to her death; the issue is how close he came, again, to self-destructing.
But he has to think now, and be logical. Because Gina doesn’t actually know anything. She’s just speculating, and not even in any focused way. She’s looking for answers. She’s upset. She’s grieving.
Norton reaches down and turns on the CD player.
She seems to think that there’s some link between her brother’s death and the gangland killing of her nephew – but she isn’t going to find one. She also seems to think that her brother wouldn’t have driven his car if he was drunk – but the alcohol level in his bloodstream is on record, and is irrefutable.
So sooner or later, and despite an obvious – and obviously congenital – stubborn streak, she’ll have to come to her senses.
Norton goes through the junction at Merrion Gates. He turns right and heads back towards town.
But still – and just to be on the safe side – he wonders if he shouldn’t arrange to have Fitz keep an eye on her.
He relaxes his grip on the steering wheel.
The track that’s playing at the moment on the stereo is gorgeous – it’s the intermezzo from…
He can’t remember what it’s called. It was in an ad.
He’ll phone Fitz later on.
As he’s passing the RDS, Patricia comes back into his mind. She’s working as an administrator, or a curator, in a museum, or a gallery, or something – he isn’t quite sure what it is. She doesn’t come home very often. She and her mother had a falling out a few years ago. It was over… again, something – he isn’t clear on the details.
He pictures her once more – he can’t help it – pictures her where Gina was standing, directly in front of him, ready to be shoved, to fall backwards into the howling wind, into the abyss.
As the music gently climaxes, he feels a lump forming in his throat. When the music stops, he glances into the rearview mirror.
He has tears in his eyes.
It is a crisp and sunny morning in Manhattan and Larry Bolger is walking north along Madison Avenue. Every half block or so he looks to the right and catches a glimpse of himself reflected in a store window. Over the coming week – here in New York, in Boston, in Chicago – this figure he sees floating beside him will be meeting the top management teams of twenty major companies. He’ll be addressing chambers of commerce and Irish-American community groups. He’ll be visiting factories and business parks. He’ll be attending power breakfasts.
He’ll be talking himself blue in the face.
But for the moment at least, and for the next hour or two, he is off the radar, a fugitive from this intense, punishing schedule, as well as from the other people on the delegation – his private secretary, his handlers, the IDA executives, the journalists.
Twenty minutes ago, Bolger slipped out through a side entrance of the hotel on 57th Street where they’re all staying and headed up here on foot. He could have used a town car or taken a cab, but he decided to walk instead. After sending a quick text to Paula, he even switched off his mobile phone.
Because the truth is, he’s actually a little nervous about this.
He crosses at 71st Street.
Up ahead, on the sidewalk, a uniformed porter is chatting with the driver of a parked limousine. The granite-clad building the two men are standing in front of is imposing but fairly anonymous. The only thing that tells you it’s the Wilson Hotel is an oval plaque on the wall next to the entrance.
Bolger strolls past a second porter. He goes through a set of revolving doors and into the lobby. He is immediately struck by how sumptuous the place is inside – with its crystal chandeliers, enormous gilt mirrors and Louis XVI-style furniture.
He heads for the desk, but before he reaches it he spots Ray Sullivan approaching from the other side of the lobby.
‘Larry, good to see you,’ Sullivan says, arm outstretched. ‘Glad you could make it.’
They shake hands vigorously.
Bolger last met Sullivan a couple of years back, in Dublin, when Amcan was opening its new plant in one of the industrial estates.
‘We have a suite upstairs,’ Sullivan says, ‘so let’s just go on up, OK?’
‘Fine.’
Bolger loves the understatement.
We have a suite upstairs.
He knows that the Oberon Capital Group not only has a suite upstairs, it actually owns the whole hotel – along with about ten billion dollars’ worth of other stuff around the globe.
‘We’ll meet some people,’ Sullivan says as they’re getting into the elevator, ‘and then Mr Vaughan will join us for lunch.’
Mr Vaughan – James Vaughan, the old man – is a cofounder of Oberon. He’s also a Wall Street legend, a former deputy director of the CIA and a veteran of the Kennedy administration.
They get out on the fifth floor and walk along a wide, empty corridor. At the very end they arrive at a door, and Sullivan raps on it lightly.
Bolger’s stomach is jumping.
The door is opened by a young man, who nods at Sullivan and then stands aside. They pass through a sort of vestibule and emerge into a large reception room. At a quick glance Bolger counts six people – two standing, four sitting. They are all men. The ones who are sitting immediately stand up and there is a general hubbub of welcome. Moving around, Bolger shakes hands with each of them in turn. One is shortish and rotund, and Bolger recognises his name – he’s a Nobel prizewinning economist. The rest of them are tall and chiselled, each with the appearance and demeanour of a five-star general in civilian clothes, or of a presidential candidate. One of them, a senator, actually was a presidential candidate a few years ago. Another one is a former defence secretary. Then there is the CEO of Gideon Global, Don Ribcoff, whom Bolger has met before. The other two he’s not sure about.
‘Sit down, Larry,’ Ray Sullivan says, ushering him over to a sofa. ‘Can I get you something to drink?’
‘Er…’ Bolger would kill for a large whiskey.
‘Water’s fine,’ he says. ‘Sparkling, thanks.’
He lowers himself onto the sofa. The senator, the former defence secretary and the economist all sit down as well – but on the sofa opposite.
‘So, Larry,’ the senator says, ‘until a while ago, it looked like you guys over there in Ireland had pretty much rewritten the rule book on how to run a successful economy.’
‘Yeah,’ Bolger says, ‘it seems we were doing something right, I suppose.’
Hearing himself here, Bolger is suddenly appalled. This is America he’s in. They don’t do self-deprecation. He has to play it up.
‘Well, the thing is,’ he goes on quickly, ‘we’ve structured a corporate tax environment that allows enterprise to breathe, to really grow, so as long as we can resist harmonisation from Brussels and get out of this slump we all seem to be in at present, I don’t see why it shouldn’t continue to go our way.’
Over the years, Bolger has never been fazed by anything he’s ever had to do in his capacity as a public representative – but this feels different. This feels like a job interview.
‘Ah, Brussels,’ the former defence secretary says, and with more than a hint of sarcasm. ‘Our friends in the Commission.’
The young man who opened the door earlier appears from Bolger’s left and presents him with a glass of water. The glass, which is on a silver tray, looks like Waterford cut crystal. Bolger takes it and raises it to the three men opposite. This feels like a foolish gesture as he’s doing it, and it is, but he can’t help himself.
He takes a sip from the glass.
‘Look,’ he says, ‘Brussels is still reeling from our rejection of Lisbon, but whatever way it plays out, whether the Treaty eventually passes or not, one thing you can be sure about, and probably for decades to come, is that tax-based competition between member states will continue – which of course is great for us, because attracting inward investment is exactly where our tax regime is so strong.’
The economist takes up this point and they tease it out for a few minutes before moving on to other topics. After about half an hour, someone’s mobile phone rings. Five minutes after that the door leading to the vestibule opens and a burly man wearing dark glasses comes in. He is followed by another man, who is much older and walking very slowly.
This is James Vaughan.
Everyone stands up.
Throughout his years as a politician, and especially since being appointed to the cabinet, Bolger has met a lot of people – dignitaries, the occasional head of state, showbiz celebrities – but this is of a different order of magnitude.
He steps forward and extends his hand. ‘It’s an honour to meet you, sir.’
Vaughan, who must be in his mid-to late seventies, is a small man, stooped and quite frail-looking. But his eyes are astonishing – blue, bright, very alert.
‘So,’ he says, shaking Bolger’s hand, ‘how is the next prime minister of Ireland?’
‘Oh, well, let’s not -’
Bolger stops himself. His impulse is to dismiss this, but he holds back. He bows in acknowledgement of the question, and smiles.
‘Or what is it you guys call it again?’ Vaughan says. ‘Tee something… Tee -’
‘Taoiseach.’
‘That’s it. Means chieftain, right?’
‘Yes. Leader. It’s -’
‘Chieftain. I like that,’ Vaughan says, looking around at the others. ‘Maybe we should use that from now on, chieftain executive officer.’
Everyone laughs.
‘OK, Phil,’ Vaughan then says, turning to the burly man he came in with. ‘I think we’re all set.’ Phil nods silently and retreats. Vaughan moves over towards the sofa, but he doesn’t sit down.
‘So, Ray,’ he says, ‘what’s the deal here, we’re going to eat something?’
‘Yes,’ Ray Sullivan says, turning backwards and clicking his fingers. The young man walks over to a set of double doors on the far side of the room and opens them.
Through the doors Bolger sees what looks like a full-sized dining room. The table is set and uniformed servers are hovering about, adjusting cutlery and repositioning glasses.
‘Larry,’ Vaughan says to Bolger, beckoning him over with an outstretched arm, ‘come, come, sit with me.’
The next hour passes very quickly for Bolger. He listens with great attention as Vaughan talks – and exclusively to him – on a wide range of subjects, including his time as Assistant Secretary at the Treasury Department under Jack Kennedy, his famous run-in with LBJ, and how he was told on good authority over thirty years ago that Mark Felt was Deep Throat. One story Bolger particularly likes is about Vaughan using the expression ‘irrational exuberance’ in a private conversation with Alan Greenspan two days before the Fed Chairman used it himself in a black-tie dinner speech and caused a worldwide wobble in the markets.
As coffee is being served, Vaughan suddenly turns the conversation around. ‘So tell me, Larry. How are things down on Richmond Dock? I hear we’re making quite an impression on your skyline over there.’
‘Yes, Mr Vaughan, indeed.’ The ‘we’ isn’t lost on Bolger. With a 15 per cent stake in the building, and Amcan, which it owns, set to be the anchor tenant, Oberon – he supposes – is a key player in the project. ‘Aside from the usual objections about height,’ he says, ‘everything has gone pretty smoothly. I think the city is ready for this.’
‘Sure it is,’ Vaughan says, ‘sure it is, a city needs its symbols. And what’s so awful about height anyway? I mean, it’s just a basic expression of… ambition. It’s in the DNA. I know it’s in my DNA.’ He waves a hand in the air. ‘Look, for an earlier generation the big idea was frontier expansion – go west, young man, that kind of thing – but for us it was go up, it was the great land grab in the sky.’
Bolger nods along at this, engrossed, barely aware of anyone else around the table.
‘And back then,’ Vaughan continues, ‘size mattered, too. That’s what it was about in the end, really, scale. It was all get a load of this, and get a load of that… I don’t know, eight miles of elevator shafts, three thousand tons of marble, two and a half million feet of electrical cable, ten million bricks…’
He follows this with a story about how in the late fifties, when he was East Coast Vice-President of Wolper & Stone, he personally oversaw the construction of the firm’s new corporate headquarters in midtown Manhattan. After that, he somehow loops back to the present and to the strategic importance for Oberon of establishing a high-profile base in Europe. In the space of about five minutes, he manages to use the words ‘bridgehead,’ ‘gateway’ and ‘portal’.
But then, at around 2.30, and out of the blue, he announces that he has to go and lie down. ‘It’s been a pleasure, Larry,’ he says, ‘but I’ve got this blood condition. Doctor’s orders.’
‘Of course, please, please.’
As Vaughan gets up, everyone else at the table gets up, too. Ray Sullivan confers with the young man, who immediately takes out his mobile phone and starts making a call.
‘Walk me to the door, Larry,’ Vaughan says to Bolger, taking him by the arm.
‘I can’t tell you what an honour this has been for me, Mr Vaughan, really.’
‘Well thank you, Larry, nice of you to say so.’ He applies a little pressure to Bolger’s arm. ‘And let me just add something.’
‘Of course.’
‘No one ever knows what’s going to happen in politics, am I right?’
Bolger nods.
‘These are democratic times we live in.’
‘Indeed.’
‘It’s the people who decide.’
‘Hhmm.’
‘But from what I’m told, in Ireland right now, you’re the man to watch, so I want you to know something.’ Vaughan lowers his voice here, almost to a whisper. ‘We’re behind you all the way.’
‘Well, thank you.’
‘And if there’s anything we can do to help…’
‘Thank you.’
When they get to the door – where the burly Phil is waiting – Vaughan releases Bolger’s arm. He turns and extends his hand. ‘Larry,’ he says, ‘it was nice meeting you.’
They shake.
‘And remember what I said.’
‘I will.’
Vaughan turns again and leaves.
Twenty minutes later, after more arm-squeezing, more handshakes, more urgent, whispered assurances of support, Bolger leaves, too. Ray Sullivan takes him back downstairs, where a car is waiting.
The driver slips across to 72nd Street and then turns left onto Fifth Avenue.
With his head still reeling, Bolger tries to interpret what has just happened.
It was an endorsement – plain and simple. Bolger is primed to take over his party. The party is a shoo-in at the next election. The Oberon Capital Group needs to maintain a US-friendly European base for its biotech, aerospace and defence contractors.
It isn’t exactly rocket science.
Nor is he under any illusions about what might be required of him. Or about how easily an endorsement from Oberon could be withdrawn.
But still, he enjoyed what just happened, and would like more of it… the naked flattery, the attention, the access.
He places his hand on the shiny black surface of the leather car seat and strokes it. He’s enjoying this, too – being driven at speed through the city, invisible behind the tinted windows of a limousine. On the outside, people flicker past, heads occasionally turning, but never close enough to see in any detail. Buildings, storefronts, façades – these are all insubstantial, one-dimensional, the city reduced to a celluloid, hallucinogenic rush. What it would be like to have a police escort, or to be at the head of a full motorcade – open top, waving at crowds, engines roaring all around you, in the line of fire – he doesn’t even want to think about, because the whole thing gives him such a tingling sense of urgency, of power, that it’s almost unbearable…
The car pulls up outside his hotel. As he waits for the driver to open the door, he takes out his mobile phone and switches it back on.
Crossing the sidewalk, he glances left at the dark windblown canyon that is 57th Street, and feels a sudden chill.
On his way into the lobby, holding his mobile out in front of him, he sees that he has six voice messages and seven texts. That volume of traffic over only a couple of hours is just a little heavy, even for him – so before he spots Paula approaching from the other side of the lobby, ashen-faced, shaking her head, Bolger knows that something is wrong.
‘What is it?’ he says.
Paula is still shaking her head when she speaks. ‘Ken Murphy.’
‘Jesus,’ Bolger says, ‘what?’
‘He’s working on a story for tomorrow.’
‘About me?’
‘Yes.’
He swallows.
Paula seems reluctant to go on. She also seems angry, or disgusted, or just weary – he isn’t sure which.
‘And?’
‘Well,’ she says, not looking him in the eye, ‘apparently it’s something about an affair and… unpaid gambling debts?’
‘How’s it going, love?’
Gina turns around. She’s startled but tries not to show it. She arrived early and sat in a booth opposite the bar, with a clear view of the entrance. She ordered a bottle of Corona. She waited.
Now, unexpectedly, Terry Stack has appeared from behind her.
She looks up at him. ‘Fine.’
She wonders if he was already here. She doesn’t think so, because she looked the place over before sitting down. Does that mean he has special privileges? He’s allowed to come in by the back door?
Maybe he actually owns Kennedy’s now.
Stack slides into the booth opposite Gina. He nods at the bottle of Corona in front of her and says, ‘Get us a pint there, would you?’
For a second Gina thinks he’s talking to her, but then she sees one of his hoodies sloping over to the bar. She doesn’t want to look around again, but she also suspects that the previously unoccupied booth behind her is now occupied.
More boys in hoodies?
His security detail.
‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me,’ she says.
Gina is determined to be civil with Stack – and neutral, as neutral as she can be.
‘The pleasure’s all mine, love.’
But straightaway she’s wondering how civil or neutral it would be to tell him that her name isn’t love.
‘Whatever,’ she says, studying the label on her Corona bottle.
‘Anyway, I’m glad you’ve kept in touch, because -’
‘I wasn’t keeping in touch,’ she interrupts. ‘Jesus. I just have a few questions I want to ask you.’
‘Right, right. Yeah. Anyway, I was going to contact you.’
‘Why?’
‘We’ll get to that.’
The hoodie returns. He places a pint of stout in front of Stack and then, glancing at Gina, disappears. Stack takes a sip from the pint and clears the foam from his upper lip.
‘So,’ he says, ‘how are you?’
‘I’m fine.’
She has no intention of elaborating. It’s none of Terry Stack’s business how she is.
‘I knew Noel’s ma had a few sisters,’ Stack then says, ‘but I didn’t realise -’
He stops here, searching for the right words.
‘What?’
‘That one of them’d be so young and… gorgeous-looking.’
Jesus. ‘Well, there you go.’
She takes a sip from her bottle. He takes another sip from his pint.
‘So what do you do?’
Gina wants to scream. Is this a date she’s on? ‘I work in software.’
‘Oh?’
Not exactly the opening he was looking for, she expects, because what’s he going to say now? That’s funny, I dabble in software, too – the piracy end of things.
‘What area?’ he says.
‘Data recovery. I work for a development company.’
‘That’s interesting.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ She leans forward. ‘Look, Terry, I don’t want to talk about my job or about how I fucking am – I just want to talk about my brother and my nephew, OK?’
Civil, neutral. Nice going.
Stack smiles. He looks less like a priest in civvies today. He’s wearing a jacket and shirt but no tie. He has thick greying hair and tired brown eyes, and there’s a weird twist to his mouth when he speaks.
‘OK,’ he says, ‘fine.’
‘Right. OK.’
‘I told you I wasn’t going to let this rest, and I’m not. I’ve been making, er… let’s call them enquiries.’
He pauses for effect.
Eventually, Gina says, ‘And?’
‘You’re in a real fucking hurry, aren’t you?’
‘Aren’t you? I thought you said whoever did this was going to pay.’
‘I did. I did. And they will.’
‘So?’
Gina can’t believe the tack she’s adopting here. Is it nerves? Is she compensating for the fact that she’s actually terrified? Because the thing is, she got Stack’s number from Catherine, but before she rang him she trawled through a few newspaper archives on the Web, and it turns out that Stack’s gang not only infringe the Copyright Act to the tune of millions of euro every year, not only deal heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis, not only traffic young girls in from Eastern Europe, but they are widely believed to be responsible for – and she can’t discount, she supposes, possible involvement in this by young Noel – three recent and particularly vicious murders.
She’s also aware of the unorthodox uses to which Stack himself sometimes puts his training as an electrician.
So just what is it, she wonders – given that she’s pretty much spent the last ten years of her own life sitting in front of a computer screen – what is it that qualifies her to be so pushy and aggressive with him?
Stack shakes his head. ‘I’m getting to it. Jesus. OK, first up, there are feuds going on out there, right? Fuckers blowing each other away because one of them has a lip on him, or he gave the other one’s girlfriend a dart, or whatever, but I run a tight ship.’
She nods.
‘The lads I have working for me are focused, you know what I mean?’
Gina wants to say, Yeah, yeah, get on with it.
‘So there was no reason for anyone to do Noel, no reason I know of, no reason at all in fact.’
Gina swallows. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Well, like I said, I talked to some people and… I’m getting some fairly fucking strange reports back. There’s rumours going around.’
‘What kind of rumours?’
‘Well.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I heard this from a couple of different people. They’re saying that the hit was really meant for your brother, that there was a mix-up -’
‘What?’
‘- with the names being the same and all. The whole thing was arranged in a big rush, apparently -’
Gina leans forward.
‘- and wires got crossed. It was just assumed that a hit on Noel Rafferty had to be, well, a hit on our Noel.’
Gina feels like she’s been punched in the stomach.
‘Now whoever done the job was a pro,’ Stack goes on. ‘There’s no denying that, but they could only act on the basis of information they were given, and that information -’
‘No, no, wait -’ Gina is shaking her head at this, and vigorously, as though trying to brush aside anything that isn’t one hundred per cent relevant. ‘I don’t understand -’
‘What?’
‘Who would want to kill my brother?’
Stack pauses and grunts.
‘You tell me. I don’t fucking know.’
‘I don’t know either. How would I know?’
‘He was your brother.’
‘Yeah, but -’
Gina is lost here. For a week she’s been contending that there was more to what happened than met the eye – and now, faced with a possible confirmation of this, she finds herself unable to accept it. She assumed there was some connection between the two deaths, a causal link – but in her mind it all remained vague and non-specific.
What Stack has just posited, by contrast, is shockingly specific.
‘I mean…’ She doesn’t know what to say. ‘It was still an accident, the way he died, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Stack says. ‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe? What are you saying?’
‘I’m not saying anything. Just that this… well, it changes things.’
‘Are you saying that maybe it wasn’t an accident?’
‘I don’t know. It still could have been, I suppose. But not necessarily.’
‘How? He was over the limit, that’s in the autopsy. His car ran off the road. Everyone says it was an accident.’
‘Gina, love, you can fake an accident. You can hold someone down and reef a naggin of Power’s down their throat. You can fiddle with the brakes of their car. There’s a million different things you can do.’
‘I don’t believe this.’
‘Look, if your brother was the target of the original hit and they fucked that up, then it makes sense that they’d try again.’
‘But do it differently.’
‘Yeah. Probably. Chances are there was a bit of panic in the air.’ He takes a sip from his pint. ‘Of course, there’s no way of proving any of this now. Because he’s gone, he’s buried, and the forensics are gone, too. Not that anyone would believe it in the first place.’
‘Oh God.’ She lowers her head.
‘Listen to me, Gina,’ Stack says. ‘This is still only speculation. No one knows who the shooter was, not yet anyway. So what you should be doing is trying to find out if anyone had it in for your brother.’
She looks up. ‘But he was… he was an engineer.’
‘Ah go on, would you. These professional cunts are no different from anyone else.’ He pauses. ‘Think. Did he owe money to anyone? Did anyone owe him money?’
Gina shakes her head. ‘How would I know?’
‘Believe me,’ Stack says, lifting his pint again, ‘with this kind of thing it’s nearly always about money.’
Gina looks around her in exasperation.
The place is almost empty. Two old-timers are sitting at the bar, and there’s a group of middle-aged women in the far corner.
It’s early, though.
This is the second time in a week that Gina has been in Kennedy’s, and she’s finding the experience unutterably weird. It’s a quiet suburban pub now, carpets and dark wood everywhere, at least four TV screens that she can see, and a blackboard menu with stuff on it like seafood chowder and toasted paninis. But when she was growing up, Kennedy’s was a very different place. What it was, in fact, was an awful dive.
Guinness, Harp, Woodbines, King crisps.
Spit, piss, vomit.
Her father used to drink here.
Gina remembers coming in as a kid – being sent in – to get him or to give him a message.
Her mother used to drink at home.
‘And if it isn’t about money,’ Stack is saying, ‘chances are it’s about sex.’
Gina looks at him. He has what could develop into a smirk on his face.
‘Noel was a happily married man,’ she says, immediately realising that to someone like Stack this might sound naive.
‘But sure they’re the worst,’ he says on cue. ‘I see blokes like that all the time, gagging for it.’
Gina doesn’t want to get into this. Taking a sip from her Corona, she tries to think of a neutral response. But then, luckily, Stack’s mobile phone goes off.
He takes the phone out of his pocket and puts it up to his ear. ‘Yeah?’
Gina looks away – over at the bar. She’s still in shock and feels a little sick. She turns back and stares down at the table.
‘When did he ask?’ Stack is saying, and in a loud whisper. ‘Was it this morning?’
Up to now Gina’s been assuming that her brother’s death was some form of collateral damage, a messy, possibly unintended consequence of her nephew’s murder. But now she has to deal with the fact that maybe the reverse is true: that her nephew’s death was the unintended consequence of her brother’s murder.
She lifts her head again. Stack is tapping his fingers against the side of his pint. His brow is furrowed. He is listening intently.
To avoid looking at him, she glances around.
Three of the TV screens are showing snooker. The fourth screen, mounted above an alcove near the door, is showing the six o’clock news. The sound is down, but Gina watches it anyway. After a few seconds it cuts from the newsreader in the studio to a reporter outside. Talking directly to camera, the reporter is across the street from a large hotel in what looks like Manhattan. Gina can’t hear him, but she senses an urgency in the way he’s speaking. Then it cuts to another man entering an office, sitting at a desk and picking up a pen to sign a document. This is one of those staged and fairly stilted archive clips they use to identify government ministers.
In this particular instance the government minister is Larry Bolger.
Gina finds this a little strange. Not strange that he’s in the news – Larry Bolger is frequently in the news – but strange because she actually had a brief conversation with the man only last week.
‘He’s a little prick.’
Startled, Gina turns back and looks across the table at Stack.
‘I gave him the details yesterday,’ he’s saying into his phone, ‘so he knows what the story is. He’s a scabby bollocks. Look, don’t let him leave. Keep him talking. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
He closes the phone and puts it away.
Gina wishes she hadn’t heard that.
‘Have to go,’ Stack says. ‘Sorry.’
‘Er… that’s OK. Thanks for the information.’
‘No problem.’
Gina takes a Lucius business card out of her wallet and hands it to him. ‘If you hear anything else, will you let me know? My mobile number is on there.’
‘Sure. Yeah. Of course.’
As he gets out of the booth, Stack produces a business card of his own and places it on the table. Without picking it up Gina can see what’s printed on it.
Terry Stack, Electrical Contractor.
‘Feel free,’ he says, ‘if you ever want to contact me.’
She nods, but doesn’t say anything.
‘Any time of the day or night,’ he adds. ‘It’s a twenty-four-hour service.’ He winks at her. ‘Emergency call-out.’
She nods again and says, ‘OK. Whatever. Thanks.’
Then she slides his card off the table and puts it into her wallet.
Stack picks up his pint and drains it. ‘Right, love,’ he says, putting the glass back down. ‘Take it easy.’
He walks off. He nods at the barman as he passes. Three guys in hoodies follow him out.
Gina’s stomach is jumping. She wants to leave now, too, but decides to hang on for a couple of minutes.
She takes a sip from her Corona.
She rubs her eyes and wonders if she shouldn’t go back and speak to everyone again. If so, who does she start with?
Eventually she puts her wallet away and slides out of the booth. On her way over to the door, she glances up at the TV screen above the alcove.
The news is still on. The German Chancellor is standing at a podium, addressing a press conference.
As Gina opens the door, she braces herself for the cold night air.
Mark is that close to calling the waiter over and ordering a drink.
Just to make this bearable.
The atmosphere tonight at Roscoe’s is lively – but not at this table. At this table, to put it mildly, things are a little strained.
Mark picks at his rocket salad. The building contractor, a small, muscular Corkman in his early sixties, moves asparagus tips around on his plate and tells a rambling story about his early days in London. The fat accountant concentrates on his fish cakes in blue-cheese sauce.
There is a bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water in the centre of the table and Mark stares at the label on it.
How could he have been so naive?
It has taken him until this, his third meeting with the building contractor, to realise that the elaborate dance of negotiations they’ve been involved in so far has really been about getting Mark to pay some money up front before any agreement can be reached. The builder hasn’t said anything explicit, but with one of his accountants sitting beside him this evening it’s clear he wants to take the matter to the next level.
He probably assumes that Mark has been playing some kind of hardball. It won’t have occurred to him that Mark is actually an idiot. In fact, it’s only when the figure of twenty thousand euro is mentioned – albeit in a suitably ambiguous context – that it dawns on Mark what is actually happening. He can’t believe he didn’t see it coming.
And they’re only on their starters.
Which is why he’d kill for some neat gin – and served, preferably, in a pint glass. But the builder and the accountant aren’t drinking, so Mark isn’t going to risk it.
He concentrates on his salad, the fat accountant mops up what’s left of his blue-cheese sauce and the builder goes on talking. It soon becomes obvious, however, that the builder is one of those people who can’t rein in irrelevant detail when telling a story, because he’s now caught up in establishing exactly when in 1969, to the week, some event – which is unrelated to the main part of the story – occurred.
Mark goes on staring at the bottle of San Pellegrino.
He doesn’t know what kind of signals he’s sending out here, but he’s pretty sure they’re mixed. Given that he really wants this contract but appears unwilling to pay for it, you’d think he’d be a little more concerned.
But the truth is Mark has been distracted of late.
He looks up.
The builder’s story is drawing to a close. Then the waiter appears and starts clearing away their plates.
‘Are you all right there, Mark?’ the accountant says. ‘You’re very quiet this evening.’
‘Yeah, no, I’m… I’m fine.’
An awkward silence follows. Sensing Mark’s apparent unwillingness to engage with the substantive issue, the accountant clears his throat and says, ‘So, did you see that about Larry Bolger?’
Mark tenses.
The builder whistles and says, ‘Yeah, Jesus, I reckon it’s going to be wall-to-wall fucking Larry for the next week at least.’
Mark is aware that something happened today, but he isn’t sure what.
‘They’re already calling for his resignation,’ the accountant says, ‘but I can’t see him giving in that easily, can you?’
‘No,’ the builder says, ‘especially as I’d say the leak came from within the party.’
‘Would you?’
‘Oh God yeah.’ He waits for the waiter to move off before he continues. ‘There’s an element in HQ trying to undermine him. It’s this crack he’s taking at the leadership. I’d lay even money on it.’
Mark’s impulse here is to remain silent. But he doesn’t. ‘What happened?’ he asks. ‘I missed it.’
‘It was in the Independent this morning,’ the builder says. ‘Ken Murphy is claiming that Bolger owes some bookie ten grand. Now he could probably get around that, but he was apparently having it off with the bookie’s wife as well.’
‘He’s a gouger,’ the accountant says. ‘He always was.’
‘Well, he’s had his fair share of controversies down through the years, that’s for sure.’
Mark’s pulse quickens. ‘What controversies?’
‘Oh, different things, gaffes, putting his foot in it, a fondness for the gargle, nothing major.’ He pauses. ‘Though it really goes back to the beginning, I suppose, the whiff does – if you know what I mean.’
‘No,’ Mark says, shaking his head, ‘I don’t.’
The builder clicks his tongue. ‘Well…’ He draws the word out. ‘Neither of you would remember it, but when Larry was first elected there was quite a bit of… talk.’
He stops and looks around, as though to check if anyone behind them or next to them is listening. Then he looks at Mark, and perhaps in that moment realises they don’t know each other well enough to be having this kind of conversation.
But Mark isn’t going to let it go. He leans forward, and says, ‘What kind of talk?’
The builder hesitates, alarmed suddenly at the urgency in Mark’s voice. ‘Look, to be honest,’ he says, ‘I don’t really know. It was just talk, and anyway -’
‘Didn’t Bolger contest the seat,’ the accountant cuts in, ‘after his brother died?’
‘Yeah, he did,’ the builder says. ‘Yeah.’
‘So what happened? How did the brother die?’
‘Well, that’s just it… he died in a car crash.’
Mark feels flushed all of a sudden. He thought he could handle this, but now he isn’t sure.
The builder exhales loudly. ‘It was horrendous… three or four people were killed.’ He shakes his head. ‘It was awful.’
The accountant nods along. ‘And?’
‘There were questions about how it happened, apparently. At the time. Anomalies. But with old man Bolger around, and the likes of Romy Mulcahy, that all got hushed up pretty quickly. Or maybe there was nothing to hush up, I don’t know. I was talking to Paddy Norton about it once and he said it was all nonsense.’
Anomalies?
That’s the only word Mark hears and it cuts into him like a knife. ‘What anomalies?’ he whispers.
The builder turns to him but again seems reluctant to continue.
Mark leans forward even more. ‘I asked you… what anomalies?’
‘Look, you know what,’ the builder says, ‘forget about it. There are strict libel laws in this country and I’m not -’
Mark bangs his fist on the table. ‘What anomalies?’
The builder is stunned.
‘Ah, now hold on here,’ the accountant says. ‘Take it easy.’
There is a long silence as Mark and the builder stare at each other.
What Mark really wants to do is reach across the table and grab this burly Corkman by the throat.
What he does instead is get up from the table and walk out of the restaurant.
By the following morning, the story has gone nuclear. It’s on all the front pages, broadsheet and tabloid, and on all the radio breakfast shows. Given the essential ingredients – gambling, sex and, according to one editorial, ‘a little bit of politics thrown in to spice things up’ – interest in the story is overwhelming. Opinion is divided, though. Some people think Larry Bolger is just what the country needs, a colourful character, a man with flaws like the rest of us; others think he is a degenerate and should be hounded from office. Pundits and punters alike have their say, and the issue is debated endlessly in op-ed columns, on panel discussions and on radio phone-ins.
In the main, Bolger’s government colleagues are supportive. An emerging line of defence seems to be that the minister did nothing illegal, and there is much semantic hand-wringing over the difference between an ‘unpaid’ debt and an ‘outstanding’ debt. We are also declared to have matured as a nation and talk of the extramarital affair is dismissed as unseemly and prurient.
But with Bolger still in the US and pressure growing for some kind of official statement, cracks begin to appear. When asked about the matter during an interview on Morning Ireland the Minister for Health displays a studied ambivalence. On Today with Pat Kenny a backbencher makes the first public reference to Bolger’s leadership ambitions, and a collective swish is almost immediately heard from Leinster House as knives are drawn and then sharpened. On the News at One opposition leaders call for the minister’s resignation, and by Liveline, members of the public, supporters and detractors, are shouting at each other live on air.
This is at two o’clock in the afternoon.
But in Boston – where Bolger is attending a breakfast of business leaders in the Signature Room of the John Hancock Conference Center – it is nine o’clock in the morning, and news of these developments is only just beginning to filter through.
So far, Bolger has frozen journalists out and apart from an initial and hastily formulated non-denial denial has refused to answer any questions. Being three thousand miles away, it is difficult to appreciate the level of engagement this whole thing is causing at home, but as Bolger addresses the business leaders over ham and eggs, Paula is outside in the lobby with her laptop listening to Liveline on the Web – and growing paler with each new contribution.
After the breakfast, she fills Bolger in and recommends that they either issue a new statement or do some interviews. They trawl though the Irish papers online looking for an angle. They discuss the possibility of Bolger’s cutting short his trip and flying home.
A little later, in one of the hotel restrooms, Bolger locks himself into a cubicle and buries his head in his hands. He can’t believe this is happening. The allegations are true of course, but they refer to a period in his life he’s always felt he’d successfully compartmentalised and moved on from. He certainly never imagined he’d be revisiting it like this.
Bolger knows that the timing of the story is no accident. And there is little doubt in his mind as to who leaked it – someone inside his own party. But the real question is, can he brazen it out? Can he contain the damage? Can he ring-fence it, or even turn it to his advantage?
As he raises his head wearily and stares at the shiny, lacquered cubicle door, his mobile phone rings. He takes it out of his jacket pocket and looks at the display.
He groans.
It’s Paddy Norton.
He lets it ring out and go into message.
‘… so, er, I’ll be in and out of the office for the next few hours. Or you can just get me on the mobile. Right? OK… Jesus, this is a disaster. I’ll talk to you later.’
Norton presses End and throws his mobile onto the desk.
He sits back in his chair and glances at his watch. He hasn’t heard from Ray Sullivan yet, but he will – that’s for sure. Amcan’s occupancy of more than forty floors of the building is not contingent upon Larry Bolger becoming Taoiseach, but it’d help. It’s definitely there in the background, part of the mood music – so there’s going to be a lot of explaining to do if Bolger’s prospects go belly-up.
Norton seems to spend most of his time these days putting out fires, and he’s getting sick of it.
Which reminds him.
He reaches forward and picks up his mobile again. He selects a number and waits.
‘Yeah?’
‘Fitz, Paddy.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘All right. Any developments?’
‘Er… let me put you on hold there for a second, Paddy, will you, and I’ll just check my notes, see what I’ve got for you.’
‘Right.’
Norton clicks his tongue.
Notes.
These days Fitz may be calling himself a private security consultant, but coming as he does from a heavy-duty paramilitary background, it’s far from fucking notes that he was raised.
Norton glances out of the window. From the sixth floor of this building there’s a view of Richmond Plaza – but there isn’t one from here, from the third floor. Which is annoying. He’s been trying to get the people on six, a firm of solicitors, to move out. But so far without success.
He hasn’t been trying hard enough.
‘Paddy?’
In a few months, though, he’ll be moving into Richmond Plaza, so it doesn’t really matter.
‘Yeah.’
‘OK. She met Terry Stack yesterday evening for about twenty minutes. Other than that she’s either been at work, which is an office in Harcourt Street, or at her gaff, which is an apartment building on the quays. But that’s it. Back and forth. No visitors. She doesn’t have a car. She buys her food in Marks & Spencer. She reads… I think it’s What Hi-Fi? magazine, or What Camera?, or what fucking something, computers, juicers, I don’t know.’ He coughs. ‘I’m working on getting access to her email and stuff, but that takes time.’
‘How about her mobile?’
‘Give me a day or two. I’m waiting on a delivery. It’s a new scanner that should do the job.’
‘Right.’ Norton pauses. ‘What does she work at, by the way?’
‘Software. It’s a small company, a start-up. From what I can gather they’re not in great shape, though.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re struggling. Financially. Victims of the downturn, whatever. So I’m told anyway.’
‘Right. And Terry Stack?’
‘I wouldn’t worry about him, he’s a fucking muppet.’
Norton doesn’t say anything to this.
‘Look, he is, believe me.’
‘Fine, fine. OK.’ He pauses again. ‘And how about our other friend?’
Fitz has been keeping an eye on Dermot Flynn as well.
‘He’s behaving himself. Nothing to worry about there.’
‘Right. OK.’
Norton stares at the floor. Does he find any of this convincing? Reassuring? Yes? No? Maybe? He can’t tell. He’s still in shock about the Larry Bolger situation.
He gets off the phone and tosses it back onto his desk.
Ten bloody grand. Why didn’t he just ask for it? Jesus.
It wouldn’t have been the first time. The man is a liability and has been since the day he got elected. But you can only work with what you’ve got, and back then Larry was all he’d got.
Frank, as it turned out, was no use to anyone – so Larry was it.
Norton buzzes out to his secretary and tells her to bring him in a double espresso. In a few minutes he has a meeting with the directors of a UK investment company who are developing a chain of health centres in a joint venture with Winterland, and Norton needs to go over some figures with them.
But he needs some caffeine first.
Because he hasn’t been sleeping too well of late.
The Bolger story calms down considerably on Friday and Saturday, but no one involved takes any consolation from this, or – depending on where they’re coming from – is disappointed. Everyone knows it’s how the Sunday papers play it that will determine if the story has legs or not.
As it turns out, none of the papers on Sunday comes up with a killer blow – it’s more like a thousand little ones, with each paper taking a different angle, each headline a different tone, sanctimonious, analytical, trashy. The effect of this is not to confuse people, however, or to turn them off, but to pique their interest.
Gina, for example, who would normally buy just one paper, ends up buying three. She’s not sure how much of this stuff she’ll actually read, but having a thick bundle of newspapers under her arm as she walks along the quays gives her a vague sense of security, of comfort even.
She’s out early.
It’s a bright morning, cold and windy, and the gusts coming in from the bay are bracing, but that’s exactly what Gina wants. She doesn’t want mild and dull and overcast, she wants fresh, clear, invigorating. She still feels raw from the last two weeks, and her grief, ever present, is like a thumping sensation in her chest.
It’s relentless – like an echo of her heartbeat.
But she’s determined not to let it overwhelm her.
She wanders past her apartment building and walks on for another hundred yards or so. She stops and looks downriver, at Richmond Plaza.
Paddy Norton was adamant that Noel’s death was an accident – caused by stress and too much alcohol. It’s the official view and it’s a fairly convincing one. It’s supported by logic, by common sense and, crucially, by evidence. It’s a view that Gina was on the point of accepting herself.
Until she spoke with Terry Stack on Wednesday evening.
She turns around and heads back to her apartment building.
Since that conversation she has been haunted by the image, conjured up so casually by Stack, of someone forcing whiskey down Noel’s throat.
It’s a horrible idea, but it’s also the only way of explaining the level of alcohol in his bloodstream. Because the simple fact is, Noel wasn’t a heavy drinker. He liked a pint now and again, he drank wine at dinner, but that was as far as it went.
Back up in her apartment, Gina throws the papers onto the sofa and goes over to the kitchen to put on some coffee.
She sorts through her laundry and fills the washing machine.
When she eventually sits down to tackle the papers, she finds herself skipping the Larry Bolger stuff at first. She’s really tired and not in the right frame of mind. Instead, she reads a few book reviews, flicks through a colour supplement, reads a recipe for moussaka, scans the international pages.
But then she gives in.
The first piece she reads calls Bolger gaffe-prone and goes through a series of incidents where he displayed, to say the least, questionable judgement – such as the classic time when as junior minister at the Department of Transport in charge of road-safety initiatives he was conducting a live radio interview on his mobile phone and it became apparent on air that he was driving his car at the same time.
She reads a detailed account of how at the taxpayers’ expense some woman called Avril Byrne accompanied Bolger on various foreign junkets – or ‘fact-finding missions’ – and how the pair routinely stayed in lavish hotel suites. On one occasion Bolger used a departmental credit card to charge € 2,400 for a meal at an exclusive restaurant in Singapore. It is also alleged that when Ms Byrne needed a pricey dental procedure Bolger diverted party funds to pay for it.
Simultaneously, it seems, the minister was running up a huge tab – as yet unsettled – at a bookmaker’s owned by Ms Byrne’s estranged husband.
In another paper Gina reads an analysis of Bolger’s career in politics: his voting record, the various issues he has supported, the crucial role he played in an earlier leadership heave. It also explains how he came to win his Dáil seat in the first place. Gina didn’t know this, but Bolger only decided – or was persuaded – to enter politics after his older brother Frank, the sitting TD, was killed in a car crash.
Gina lowers the paper onto her lap. She stares out across the room for a moment.
People die on our roads every day of the week.
Then she picks up the Sunday World and flicks through it until she finds a two-page spread that she previously only glanced at. At the bottom of the first page there is a small black-and-white photograph of a wrecked Mercedes. The caption reads: frank bolger in road carnage.
She scans the accompanying article, but it contains only a brief reference to the crash.
… outside Dublin… two cars… four people killed…
Gina takes a deep breath.
… including a little girl.
She stares at the photograph for a while.
Then she puts the paper down, adding it to the pile she already has beside her on the sofa. She glances out of the window. The day has become overcast, but it’s still windy. Clouds roll by.
She thinks of Noel’s SUV skidding off a country road, swerving, plunging… then the impact, then Noel crushed and battered inside, surrounded by fumes and burning smells, oil, blood, rubber. She thinks of him lying there half conscious, groaning, dying…
What went through his head in those last few moments?
Tears come into her eyes. She rolls sideways, onto the pile of newspapers, and starts to sob.
After a few minutes, the tears subside. Using her sleeve, she wipes her eyes. She curls up. She gets drowsy. She falls asleep.
About an hour later – in the middle of a confused dream – she wakes up, startled.
The phone is ringing.
She rubs her eyes.
She gets up from the sofa. The phone is on the desk in the corner, next to the computer. She goes over and picks it up. She pulls the chair out and sits down. ‘Hello?’ she says, sniffing.
‘Hello, Gina, it’s Jackie Merrigan.’
Gina furrows her brow. She is puzzled. Does she know any Jackie Merrigan?
But after a second it hits her.
That old friend of Noel’s she met at the removal. The detective superintendent.
‘Oh. Hello. How are you?’
‘I’m fine. I’m fine. I was just ringing to check in and see how you are. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘No, no, not at all. Thank you.’
‘I was thinking about Noel today and… he was very fond of you, you know. He often mentioned you.’ He pauses. ‘It’s still only sinking in, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. It’s hard to believe.’
Gina pictures Merrigan – tall and stooped, silver hair, distinguished-looking. He seemed quite gentle, not at all the stock image of a detective superintendent.
‘And how are your sisters?’ he asks.
‘They’re OK,’ Gina says. ‘Catherine isn’t, of course. She couldn’t be, really.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
As they chat about Catherine and then Noel, Gina has a growing urge to put a few direct questions to Merrigan, to air her theories, but something holds her back. She doesn’t want to be patronised. She doesn’t want to be told, yet again, that there’s nothing mysterious here, that it was just a tragic accident.
‘Strange about Larry Bolger,’ she eventually says, for want of something else to say. ‘I’ve just been reading about him in the papers.’
‘Yes,’ Merrigan says. ‘It looks pretty serious for him all right. I don’t see how he can wriggle out of this one.’
‘No,’ Gina says. She stares at her reflection in the blank computer screen. ‘Though one thing I didn’t know about was his brother being killed in a road accident. Did you?’
‘Oh God, I did, yeah. I remember that well. It was awful. I was actually stationed in Swords at the time. I was still in uniform.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
She hesitates, but then says, ‘How did it happen?’
He sighs. ‘Well, it was a quiet stretch of road, as I remember. It wasn’t late, eight or nine in the evening. There were two cars and they swerved to avoid each other… but one of them hit a wall and the other one hit a tree. There were four people killed. Awful.’
Gina nods along, biting her lip.
‘Anyway,’ Merrigan says, ‘two or three months later Larry Bolger wins the by-election, and the rest, as they say, is history. But I’ll tell you one thing.’ He laughs. ‘Frank Bolger was a very different kettle of fish from his brother.’
Gina refocuses. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Ach… he was a bit of an idealist. Always getting people’s hackles up. He’d object to everything. There was never any question of a compromise with Frank, or of being pragmatic. I’m not sure he’d have lasted as long as Larry.’
‘He didn’t, though,’ Gina says, ‘did he?’
‘No, I suppose you’re right, he didn’t.’
There is a pause.
Then Gina says, ‘But getting back to the accident. Whose fault was it? Do they know?’
‘That’s an interesting one,’ Merrigan says, ‘because there was quite a bit of talk at the time.’
‘Talk?’
‘Yeah, there were conflicting… opinions, let’s say, about what caused it. The official story was that the driver of the other car was seriously tanked up, the usual bloody story.’ He pauses. ‘But then claims were made that maybe this guy hadn’t been drinking after all, that he was a teetotaller in fact, and that maybe Frank Bolger was the one who’d been drinking and that there was a campaign on to protect his reputation.’
‘And?’
‘It blew over. These things usually do.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Of course none of it was in the papers, or in the public domain, as they say. It was all just rumour and speculation. I mean, God, you know what this town is like.’
‘Sure.’
‘There was even a suggestion at the time that it might have been convenient for certain people to have Frank Bolger out of the way.’
Gina is stunned at this. She waits for Merrigan to say more, to elaborate, to go further and join up the dots.
She’s ready to do it for him.
‘But you know what?’ he then says. ‘Whenever a public figure dies in an accident you always get this kind of crackpot nonsense. It’s typical.’
‘Hmm.’ Gina looks down at the floor.
‘Today, I suppose,’ Merrigan goes on, with contempt, ‘you’d call it a conspiracy theory.’
‘Yes.’
‘But the sad fact is -’
‘I know,’ Gina says, swallowing. ‘I know. People die on our roads every day of the week.’
‘Exactly, Gina, exactly. I mean, take -’
He stops here. Gina is pretty sure he has just looped back in his mind to Noel and to what happened and that he feels a sudden awkwardness.
‘Well anyway,’ Gina says to fill the space, ‘it’s still awful, no matter what caused it. I mean, Bolger died, this other guy died, his wife died.’ She pauses here and closes her eyes. ‘And their little girl died…’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Merrigan says. ‘It was awful. Absolutely tragic.’
They both remain silent for a moment. An articulated truck rumbles past outside, along the quays. Somewhere in the distance an alarm is ringing.
‘But then of course,’ Merrigan says, ‘there was the little boy.’
Gina opens her eyes. ‘The what?’
‘Yes,’ Merrigan goes on, ‘there was a little boy, too. The second car had four people in it. The father, the mother and two kids. The girl died, but the little boy survived. And with nothing more than a few scratches. It was a miracle. They reckon it was the side of the car he was in, and the angle, in relation to the impact.’
‘My God.’
‘But he more or less got up and walked away. They kind of played it down afterwards. Again, the tabloids would be all over a story like that today, but back then they were a little more circumspect. I mean, the kid would have been only what, five, six years old.’
Gina sits up. ‘And what happened to him?’
‘As far as I remember someone in the family took him in, adopted him.’
They both go silent again. All Gina can do is shake her head in disbelief.
Eventually she reaches forward, across the desk, and grabs a pen. ‘Jackie,’ she says, holding the pen poised over a piece of paper, ‘I don’t suppose you can remember the name of the little boy, can you?’
‘As a matter of fact I can,’ he says. ‘I remember it very well. His name was Mark Griffin.’
‘Australia?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
‘Dermot, people in their twenties go to Australia. I don’t know, they get drunk and go surfing and stuff.’
Claire holds her wine-glass up and studies her husband.
He can see that she’s struggling to take this seriously.
‘The girls would love it,’ he says.
‘What? The beer and the surfing?’
‘No, the -’
‘Dermot, what is this? I thought -’
‘OK, not Australia, somewhere else, the States, Canada.’
He looks around. Being Sunday evening, the place is not that busy. It’s also the first time he’s been in a restaurant where the tables are so far apart you’d have to shout to be overheard.
But he likes it. He likes the privacy.
‘I don’t understand where this is coming from,’ Claire says. ‘I thought the job -’
‘Look, BCM have offices all over the world.’
‘Oh God.’ She’s on the point of getting annoyed.
‘What?’ he says, taking a mouthful of risotto and hoping they don’t end up being overheard after all.
‘You want to know what?’ She leans forward. ‘I’ll tell you what. The girls are settled in school. They have friends. You can’t just yank them out of that for six months or a year. And besides.’ She skewers a scallop with her fork. ‘Mum and Dad aren’t getting any younger. I don’t want to be thousands of miles away.’
Which is precisely where Dermot wants to be.
But he nods in agreement. She’s right and he knows it. They can’t just take off the way he’s proposing. It’s not that they’re trapped here exactly, but they’re settled too, they have responsibilities.
He just thought…
‘Well?’
He looks up. Claire is nodding at his risotto.
‘The truffle,’ she says, an edge in her voice. ‘Can you taste it?’
‘Yeah. It’s amazing.’
She does a quick thing with her eyebrows, a non-verbal It’d bloody better be, at forty euro a plate.
Dermot pushes the risotto in her direction. ‘Try it.’
She reaches across with her fork and scoops a bit up.
What he hasn’t been able to tell Claire, of course, is that for the last couple of weeks he has been under constant surveillance. That’s the working assumption, at any rate. These people know where his office is and where the kids go to school. He takes it they’re watching the house as well, and logging his every move – where he goes, who he talks to. And maybe there’s more to it than that. He doesn’t know. Are they recording his phone calls, for instance, and intercepting his emails? Are they tracking his internet use?
Are they filming his life – twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?
Obviously not. That’d be absurd.
But the thing is, they may as well be.
Because Dermot is now painfully self-conscious about every single thing he does. He can’t move or speak without feeling ill at ease. It’s as though he’s been cast against his will in some nightmarish reality TV show – but no one has explained to him what the rules are or who’s producing it.
Nevertheless, he’s been playing along. He drops Orla and Niamh off at school every morning. He goes into the office. He works. He comes home. He hasn’t uttered a word to anyone about the report – which he has also deleted, along with an early draft of it and any relevant emails. He hasn’t got into a conversation with anyone about Noel Rafferty. Nor does he have any intention of doing so. Because these fuckers have his balls in a vice grip and he’s not going to give them the slightest excuse to tighten it.
‘Oh my God,’ Claire says, ‘that is delicious.’
He looks across at what she is having. ‘How are the scallops?’
‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘they’re fine.’
Fine? Whatever.
Dermot smiles thinly across the table at his wife. He has told her more lies in the past two weeks than in all the rest of the time they’ve known each other, which is the best part of twelve years. He has lied about work, about money, about his state of mind.
He lied to her earlier today about why he wanted to take her out to this overpriced two-star Michelin restaurant. He said he wanted to make it up to her for being so moody and hard to live with recently. But the real reason was that he wanted to send them a coded message. Originally, he’d had a grander gesture in mind – he wanted to go straight out and blow all the cash on a new car, a Mercedes SL or a Jaguar, something that screamed, Hey, I’m not shy about spending your money, I’m not conflicted, I’m in. But he couldn’t have explained it to Claire. The bonus he’d lied about getting at work wasn’t that big.
So he figured, in the meantime… dinner at Cinq.
And some jewellery.
He bought her an expensive pair of earrings and a chain the other day – mainly to be seen buying them – but he hasn’t had the nerve to give them to her yet.
He nods at her plate again. ‘Well, they look nice.’
‘They are. Jesus. I didn’t say they weren’t. Here.’ She skewers a scallop up and holds it out to him. It’s almost like a challenge. ‘Try one.’
With both forks held high, they make the transfer. It’s an awkward manoeuvre, and slightly combative-looking. Dermot places the scallop at the side of his plate.
A waiter then glides up to the table and asks them if everything is all right.
‘Yes,’ Dermot says, smiling up at him, ‘wonderful, everything, thank you.’
‘Yes,’ Claire says, ‘thank you.’
After the waiter has gone, Dermot says, ‘The service here is great, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
It’s the more abstract lies that he hates, though – the emotional lies, trying to pass his fear off as despondency, trying to make it seem as if he’s burned out and needs a change of scene.
That stuff is really hard to maintain.
Because Claire isn’t stupid. Far from it. In fact, from the look she’s giving him right now, he even thinks she might have her suspicions about what’s going on.
At some level, anyway.
‘Dermot,’ she says, and shrugs, ‘I’m not sure what’s happening here, the weird behaviour… Australia, this.’ She spirals a forefinger in the air to indicate their immediate surroundings. ‘I’m really not, but -’
‘Yeah?’
Now he hopes she has her suspicions, and that she’s smart enough to work it out, because he’s getting desperate here. He needs to be able to share this. He looks her in the eye, willing her to see, to understand.
‘- the thing is,’ she says, and hesitates.
‘Yeah… yeah?’
It’s almost as if he’s panting.
‘Look, I hate myself for even asking you the question,’ she goes on finally – and all of a sudden his heart sinks – ‘but, I don’t know… are you having an affair or something?’